About me

This blogname was derived from the novel The Secret Life Of Saeed The Pessoptimist by the Palestinian Israeli Emile Habiby: absurdism as weapon against the (ir)realities of daily life in Palestine/Israel. (The subtitle is from a book by Dutch author Renate Rubinstein. It could as well be my motto).
My real name is Martin (Maarten Jan) Hijmans. I've been covering the ME since 1977 and have been a correspondent in Cairo. I started my 'Abu Pessoptimist' blog in January 2009 out of anger during the onslaught in Gaza. The other one, The Pessoptmist, is meant to be a sister version in English. (En voor de Nederlandstaligen: ik wilde in november 2009 een tweede blog in het Engels beginnen en ontdekte te laat dat als je één account hebt, een profiel dan meteen ook voor allebei de blogs geldt. Vandaar dat het nu ineens in het Engels is... So sorry.)

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Four killed by bomb attacks in Medina and elsewhere in Saudi Arabia

Four security officers have been killed and five others injured in a suicide
attack outside the Prophet's Mosque in Saudi Arabia's Medina, Islam's
second holiest city, the Saudi interior ministry said.
Photos on social media show smoke billowing from a fire outside the mosque. The blast occurred just before the Maghreb (sunset) prayers on Monday
when people were breaking their fast inside the mosque.
Saudi Arabia's state-run news channel, Al-Ekhbariya, aired live video
of thousands of worshippers praying inside the mosque hours after the
explosion. Around the same time as the Medina blast, two other explosions struck
near a mosque in the eastern city of Qatif on the Gulf coast, residents
said.
Witnesses said a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a Shia mosque without causing any other injuries.Early on Monday morning, two security officers were injured as a suicide bomber blew himself up near the US consulate in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah. Security officers became suspicious of a man near the car park of Dr
Suleiman Faqeeh Hospital which is directly across from the US diplomatic
mission. When they moved in to investigate, "he blew himself up with a
suicide belt inside the hospital parking", the ministry said, adding
that two security officers were lightly wounded.
In January, at least four people were killed in a suicide attack on a Shia mosque in the eastern al-Ahsa region.

In October, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group
claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a Shia mosque in Najran,
in which at least one person was killed.
ISIL (also known as ISIS) had also claimed responsibility for an
attack at a mosque inside a special forces headquarters in the city of
Abha in August 2015. Fifteen people were killed in that attack.